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Sure the parts I needed weren’t available. Which is probably the problem with these iFixit scores. They should really wait for the laptop to be a few years old and then look and see if the stuff that’s actually breaking on the laptop are actually repairable with the parts available.
For this particular laptop even though it had a really good iFixit score, I couldn’t even buy a new touchpoint nub (or whatever HP calls it). The old one completely disintegrated but the nub was different than other HP laptops, so the ones I tried to buy (even for other elitebooks) wouldn’t fit. The nub the laptop needed simply wasn’t available anywhere.
I once bought a HP Elitebook on the basis of a very good repairability score from iFixit. It was a shit laptop but the big problem was that as it started breaking I found it impossible to find parts for it. It doesn’t matter if it’s held together by torx screws with no glue if you can’t actually get any parts.
The article doesn’t really explain why except “maybe someone would like it” but I think the real answer was CGA. CGA was a predecessor color technology to VGA with a different 8 bit color space. So if you took a color scheme for CGA and rendered it on VGA you’d end up with a really garish scene.
When I was a kid I had a DOS game that I played the hell out of. I ended up ruining the disk, and stupidly didn’t have a backup, but the box included a CGA version of the game. It played just fine on my computer except that the colors were trippy on my VGA monitor.
I graduated in 2006. When I was in school the idea was that there wouldn’t be any programmers left in the USA because it would all be offshore. But by the time I graduated it was fairly easy to find work. There was a slowdown in 2008 but tech did better than most other fields. This is where the idea comes from that tech will come back, I think. Tech is cyclical but it’s not on the same cycle as other business, or hasn’t been.
The whole AI thing is fake. What’s really going on is another massive offshoring attempt. Everyone I know who’s lost a job lost it to offshoring not AI. This is basically 2001 all over again. So the idea is that offshoring will not work out again and the jobs will come back. Is it true or is this time different? I’m not entirely sure.
Unironically one of the most surprising thing about the current crop of techbros is how anti-intellectual they are. Back in the day Paul Graham published a smarmy essay about how you shouldn’t have possessions except books. Nowadays, I see so many techbros saying “I hate books” and “I never read.”
It’s weird to have your self identity be both I’m smarter than everyone else and also I don’t read. I really am baffled at how they square that circle.
When I was a kid there was a cartoon called Captain Planet.
The bad guys would build these factories that didn’t seem to produce anything but pollution. Like, they would take in trees and sea creatures or whatever, and the only thing that would come out is smog and green water. It was very on-the-nose.
Bitcoin is a pollution factory.
They would have had to build that infrastructure. I’m not saying fundraising is easy. But it’s possible as proven by wikipedia. They could have cut Google loose 10 years ago and said "we’re going to use our runway to try to put together a wikimedia foundation style fundraising operation. I don’t think they can do it now because the trust, goodwill and quite frankly, userbase is gone.
What on earth would that do? The poisonous leadership would not use it to improve the browser nor would they start working for donors instead of Google.
My point is that there is a funding model that they could have pursued when they still had goodwill and trust. And my hope is if the government finally puts the boot in with Google, then this current version of mozilla will collapse, the rats will leave the ship and hopefully a good browser will emerge the way firefox emerged from netscape.
Mozilla could have focused on being user-supported through fundraising like Wikipedia. Instead they chose the comfortable path of being funded by their biggest competitor, who is an evil monopoly spyware ad business, which has been compelling Mozilla to kill Firefox and become the badies on the way down.
Man, I’m so glad this shit is illegal on multiple levels in Europe.
In other news: https://midwest.social/post/17142014
I quite frankly flat out do not understand why people on the left are so against space exploration suddenly
Ever heard the song “whitey on the moon?”
Setting that aside, exploring space is not the same thing as building a company town for the world’s least mentally stable pregnancy fetishist oligarch in an unworldly cold desert where everyone is sure to die.
Generative AI is just classification engines run in reverse. Classification engines are useful but they’ve been around and making incremental improvements for at least a decade. Also, just like self-driving cars they’ve been writing checks they can’t honor. For instance, legal coding and radiology were supposed to be automated by classification engines a long time ago.
As a leftist I think that transsexuals should not be discriminated against. I’m also highly disturbed by the idea of medicalizing everything and turning a sexual identity into an excuse for prescribing dangerous and harsh drugs and body modification surgery. The whole thing feels like an op by the for-profit healthcare industry.
The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own.
That is not what the lawsuit is about, and that was not what the plaintiffs or the judge argued. Their argument is that if you can not take a physical copy and digitize it.
If you want a digital copy to lend, you must beg the publisher to allow you to have a digital copy to lend and you must accept their terms. If they don’t want to provide you with a digital lending option as a library, then you can not lend it. If they want to make you use their DRM software you must use it even if it spies on your patrons and charges you per-lending fees, or even “expires” the book after so many loans, or “blacks out” or “embargoes” lending of titles you are supposed to have in your catalog (these are all features of publisher-backed digital lending schemes).
This is depressing as hell and a statement about the time we live in and the corporate overlords who control our lives.
Jimmy McGee made a great video about it last year:
I wanna see Sam Altman reenact the “make it work” mirror scene from always sunny.
No, LGPL just allows linking to differently-licensed software.
Basically linking copies some code from the library into the program that uses it, making any linked software a derivative work.
Sellers of proprietary software libraries give permission for this specific type of linking in their license. LGPL gives the same permission to people who are otherwise following the GPL. LGPL used to be called the “library-GPL” because it is the GPL plus permission to use the library linking mechanism.